An English phrasebook inspired Ionesco's first absurdist play
Romanian-born Eugène Ionesco (1909–1994) wrote mostly in French and helped detonate mid-century avant-garde drama. Learning English at forty, he found the textbook's stiff dialogues so uncanny that he turned them into The Bald Soprano, an anti-play that helped launch the Theatre of the Absurd.
Born Eugen Ionescu in Slatina to an Orthodox father and a mother of French and Romanian descent, he later shaved three years off his age so his birth would match 1912, the year his idol, the playwright Caragiale, died. As a child in France he had a moment of blazing light in a sunlit village that left ordinary reality looking decayed and repetitive by comparison, a feeling that runs through his later disgust with the physical world and his characters' longing for a luminous city.
After his parents divorced he returned to Romania in 1925, studied French literature in Bucharest from 1928 to 1933 and befriended Emil Cioran and Mircea Eliade for life. He began as a combative critic: Nu attacked leading Romanian poets, and Hugoliade mocked Victor Hugo's greatness. He married Rodica Burileanu in 1936, went to France in 1938 for a doctorate, was stranded in Romania when war came, and escaped back to France in 1942, living in Marseille and then Paris.
Using the Assimil method, he copied out lessons in which Mr and Mrs Smith solemnly informed each other of facts they already knew. The truisms collapsed into parody, and in 1948 he wrote La Cantatrice chauve, staged in 1950. It flopped until Jean Anouilh and Raymond Queneau championed it. A burst of one-act sketches followed, including The Lesson and The Chairs, built on accelerating rhythms and mechanical, puppet-like characters rather than plot or psychology.
Later plays centre on Bérenger, a naive, half-autobiographical everyman. In Rhinocéros he watches his friends turn into rhinoceroses, Ionesco's image of the conformism he saw in Romania's fascist Iron Guard, and in Exit the King of 1962 he must face his own death. The Académie française elected Ionesco in 1970, the year of his Austrian State Prize, and the Jerusalem Prize followed in 1973.
Source: Eugène Ionesco
